Skip to main content

Throwback Thursday; Elphant Butte Lake and New Mexico State Route 195

Back in 2012 I visited an old alignment of US Route 85 and Elephant Butte Lake on the Rio Grande River.


Elephant Butte Lake is the largest Reservoir in New Mexico with a maximum surface area of over 36,000 acres.  Elephant Butte Dam was constructed from 1911 to 1916 and was at the time the largest dam built for the sole purpose of irrigation water impounding.

When US Route 85 was first signed it was routed through what is now the City of Elephant Butte on New Mexico State Route 195.  US 85 would have ran briefly along the west bank of Elephant Butte Lake to modern NM 179 where it continued to Hot Springs (Modern Truth or Consequences) on modern NM 51.  According to Steve Riner's New Mexico Highway site US 85 was routed on the current alignment of NM 195, NM 179 and NM 51 until the 1940s when it was shifted to the modern alignment of NM 181.

steve.riner.com on NM Highways 176-200

steve-riner.com on NM Highways 51-75

The shift in US 85 can be seen by comparing these New Mexico State Highway Maps from 1927 to 1956.

1927 Arizona and New Mexico State Highway Maps

1956 State Highway Map

Interestingly NM 195 used to carry traffic over a one-way routing  Elephant Butte Dam until the early 2000s.  More information can be found regarding the topic above on Steve Riner's page for NM Routes 176-200.  Given the route over the dam was closed I obviously didn't a chance to cross it in a car.  Suffice to say finding information regarding state highways in New Mexico was difficult back in 2011-2012 when I was working in the state.  Oddly a large number of New Mexico State Highways don't even have a Wikipedia article to this day.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Old River Lock & Control Structure (Lettsworth, LA)

  The Old River Control Structure (ORCS) and its connecting satellite facilities combine to form one of the most impressive flood control complexes in North America. Located along the west bank of the Mississippi River near the confluence with the Red River and Atchafalaya River nearby, this structure system was fundamentally made possible by the Flood Control Act of 1928 that was passed by the United States Congress in the aftermath of the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 however a second, less obvious motivation influenced the construction here. The Mississippi River’s channel has gradually elongated and meandered in the area over the centuries, creating new oxbows and sandbars that made navigation of the river challenging and time-consuming through the steamboat era of the 1800s. This treacherous area of the river known as “Turnbull’s Bend” was where the mouth of the Red River was located that the upriver end of the bend and the Atchafalaya River, then effectively an outflow

Memphis & Arkansas Bridge (Memphis, TN)

  Like the expansion of the railroads the previous century, the modernization of the country’s highway infrastructure in the early and mid 20th Century required the construction of new landmark bridges along the lower Mississippi River (and nation-wide for that matter) that would facilitate the expected growth in overall traffic demand in ensuing decades. While this new movement had been anticipated to some extent in the Memphis area with the design of the Harahan Bridge, neither it nor its neighbor the older Frisco Bridge were capable of accommodating the sharp rise in the popularity and demand of the automobile as a mode of cross-river transportation during the Great Depression. As was the case 30 years prior, the solution in the 1940s was to construct a new bridge in the same general location as its predecessors, only this time the bridge would be the first built exclusively for vehicle traffic. This bridge, the Memphis & Arkansas Bridge, was completed in 1949 and was the third

California State Route 203 the proposed Minaret Summit Highway

California State Route 203 is an approximately nine-mile State Highway located near Mammoth Lakes in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of Mono County.  California State Route 203 as presently configured begins at US Route 395, passes through Mammoth Lakes and terminates at the Madera County line at Minaret Summit.  What is now California State Route 203 was added to the State Highway System in 1933 as Legislative Route Number 112.  The original Mammoth Lakes State Highway ended at Lake Mary near the site of Old Mammoth and was renumbered to California State Route 203 in 1964.  The modern alignment of the highway to Minaret Summit was adopted during 1967.   The corridor of Minaret Summit and Mammoth Pass have been subject to numerous proposed Trans-Sierra Highways.  The first corridor was proposed over Mammoth Pass following a Southern Pacific Railroad survey in 1901.  In 1931 a corridor between the Minarets Wilderness and High Sierra Peaks Wilderness was reserved by the Forest Service for po